To prosper in the Internet economy, a company must be able to streamline its business process, eliminate unnecessary cost, and react quickly to competitive pressures. To support this mandate, information technology (IT) organizations must have the ability to rapidly consolidate systems from newly created or incorporated divisions and, in many cases, to exchange mission-critical information with outsourced partners as a virtual enterprise. New Internet applications must be linked with each enterprise's core technologies to deliver accurate information, solid operational performance, and a satisfactory customer purchase experience. And, whether companies do business on the Web or not, customers expect all businesses to run on Internet time—a rapid pace that calls for seamless, high-performance business operations that can be accomplished only when applications are integrated with each other to create the zero latency enterprise.
The first business issue is the integration of critical business information and logic that reside in enterprise production and legacy systems. Multiple IT systems that are implemented as silos or standalone systems, each addressing particular business issues, should be integrated across the enterprise.
Traditionally, islands of individual applications that need to share data have been integrated in an adhoc manner, using homegrown integration and, more recently, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) toolsets. These hard-coded and point-to-point solutions attempted to address the problem but created an IT nightmare of innumerable spaghetti-like connections between applications. EAI solutions that cobble together a combination of point-to-point interfaces, procedure calls, file transfers, and “e-mail-like” messaging to deliver enterprise-wide data transformation and routing are notoriously high risk.
Further, multiple point-to-point and ad hoc solutions are inherently difficult to deploy and maintain because they lack a centralized management and support for real-time change management. These features are desirable to the management of business processes and the goal of addressing the e-commerce integration environment.
The second business issue is the need to incorporate Web-based, e-commerce applications. The goal of getting on the Web, however, was not a simple one; only new businesses starting from scratch had the luxury of building from the ground up. With substantial IT infrastructures and investments in place, most businesses were faced with having to leverage current information systems and merge them into the e-commerce age. Businesses that are not able to integrate customer-facing Web applications with enterprise systems find that they simply cannot support today's competitive market and customer demands. This is because data is locked away in disparate systems that do not speak the same language, much less speak to each other.
The third business issue is taking full advantage of integrated e-commerce, including the integration of business processes with trading partners. E-Commerce enables companies to enjoy significant savings and increase revenue opportunities by (1) improving service to customers, (2) engaging in just-in-time production, (3) finding more competitive providers of operational goods and production materials, and (4) being able to create new markets quickly. These two objectives—reducing cost and increasing revenue—have always been driving business forces. However, to date, there has been no solution that has provided the key enablers for e-business. Electronic data interchange (EDI) emerged in the 1990s as a standard for exchanging data between companies. EDI is a highly structured, expensive, and time-consuming technology. Packaged solutions have also emerged that claim to solve business-to-business (B2B) dilemmas; however they also require heavy investment in proprietary application technology across all business partners, entail significant configuration expertise, and deliver a hard-coded, pre-packaged process that all parties must adopt. Packaged solutions and EDI deliver very little competitive advantage, are not customizable for differing business processes, and are expensive, time-consuming options.
Most people are familiar with the traditional EDI batch mode type of B2B, and with the more recent electronic store fronts of dot-coms, otherwise referred to as basic commerce. While both EDI and basic commerce provide companies with business advantages that were not previously available—the high costs and technical constraints of implementing EDI and the minimal transaction functionality of basic commerce have limited their adoption as long-term e-business strategies. Community commerce, the third type of B2B e-commerce, features the same characteristics of basic commerce—the simple matching of buyers and sellers online—with perhaps some added functionality, such as auction and search, and the sharing of common information with vertical or community groups. However, these three types of commerce share one common limitation—they do not involve real-time, dynamic conversations between businesses. The sharing of information is in the form of simple point-to-point messages that are not really conversations. While these types of commerce may be sufficient to do things like sharing simple inventory information with suppliers, or posting product catalogs for buyers, these types of commerce have, to date, done little more than simply take information and automate its distribution to participants.
Existing B2B models fall short in meeting modern day requirements. From EDI and outsourced procurement to supply chain management systems and first-generation online exchanges, companies are feverishly searching out technology that will enable them to quickly, efficiently, and reliably conduct business with trading partners over the Internet. Unfortunately, companies are discovering that most of these traditional B2B technologies meet only a fraction of their e-business IT requirements. A more comprehensive, powerful and flexible solution is required to successfully meet the challenges of collaborative B2B commerce today.
While EDI offers an advantage over paper-based business transactions, it has traditionally been restricted to large companies with substantial IT budgets and technical resources. EDI typically requires as much as 9-12 months to implement and can be quite costly. Finally, EDI is not real-time or process-driven. Data is batch transmitted, and transactions can be sent out of sequence without system oversight. In some cases, data may not be received at all—creating consternation and confusion on all sides.
Unlike EDI, new B2B solutions are designed to leverage the Internet and technologies such as Java, in order to lower the barriers to entry for trading partners of any size, reduce deployment cycles and cost, and power managed, real-time communication between partners. Recognizing that EDI will continue to be used by many of the world's largest companies because of familiarity and confidence in legacy systems, new Internet-based e-business platforms must also co-exist comfortably with EDI legacy systems. Nonetheless, as the real and opportunity costs of using EDI grow, companies are investing IT resources in Internet-based systems that make more financial and strategic sense.
Another commonly found form of B2B interaction is the use of outsourced e-procurement applications. Web-based purchasing of maintenance, repair, and operation (MRO) supplies—the goods required to run a company but not the materials used in the direct manufacture of a product or the provision of a service—is becoming more and more common every day. To deliver process efficiencies and cost savings, many companies have outsourced their MRO provisioning to third parties because these goods are non-strategic, low-cost items that can be intermittently purchased in bulk from a pre-established set of suppliers.
However, from a technology perspective, outsourced e-procurement is much like EDI in that it increases efficiency over paper-based processes but is also monolithic, inflexible, and requires all participants to adopt a single proprietary application. This does not enable customers to create competitive advantage by streamlining their mainstream purchasing process or doing business any differently than direct competitors. These serious limitations, combined with the fact that MRO vendors typically own all the data associated with using their exchange, mean that most companies are reluctant to consider e-procurement vendors for their core or strategic enterprise functions. In fact, some participants in MRO exchanges may consider e-procurement vendors as potential downstream competition and are careful to limit the scope of business conducted on these sites.
Given these factors, while many companies may continue using MRO procurement for a portion of their e-business portfolio, they must still acquire strategic technology that will encompass MRO exchanges but support larger and more strategic e-business objectives.
Some organizations have implemented B2B solutions as a first-generation online exchanges for e-markets and supply chain management. An e-market maker can be defined as an organization that develops a B2B, Internet-based, e-marketplace of buyers and sellers within a particular industry, geographic region or affinity group. The list of e-market makers is growing larger every day.
Although it is indisputable that e-marketplaces in general will power much of e-business tomorrow, supporting a broad variety of collaboration, purchasing sales and trading activities, the majority of them are not delivering on the B2B promise today. A recent research study found that of 600 surveyed exchanges, only 10 provided application integration. A primary goal of B2B and online marketplaces is to reduce human intervention. This goal cannot be achieved unless systems are integrated from end-to-end.
E-Markets without back-end integration to a company's enterprise systems significantly reduces the return on investment for e-market makers and participants, and limits that company's opportunities to satisfy customers in new and unique ways. Supply chain transparency, which occurs when e-market makers have increased visibility into a supplier's product availability and delivery information, enables B2C companies to better meet customer demands in real-time and represents a significant source of competitive advantage. The differentiating factor between two supply chains often boils down to which one is better at managing the information float—the time between when data is captured in one place and when it becomes available and actionable elsewhere.
As e-markets continue to proliferate—interconnecting with each other and growing into tomorrow's interconnected e-business “power grid”—they promise to super-charge the B2B network effect. E-businesses need to respond quickly to market demand, and as such look to build not just their own supply chains but also those of their customers and suppliers. These benefits will flow through entire industry segments as information improves, order processing becomes easier, and all parties can begin to rely on getting what they need to meet customer demands in a timely fashion.